Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: The Seattle Times reports that since the 1950s, geological reports on the hill that buckled last weekend killing at least 17 residents in Snohomish County in Washington State have included pessimistic analyses and the occasional dire prediction. But no language seems more prescient than what appears in a 1999 report filed warning of “the potential for a large catastrophic failure.” Daniel Miller, a geomorphologist, documented the hill’s landslide conditions in a report written in 1997 for the Washington Department of Ecology and the Tulalip Tribes. Miller knows the hill’s history, having collected reports and memos from the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and 1990s and has a half-dozen manila folders stuffed with maps, slides, models and drawings, all telling the story of an unstable hillside that has defied efforts to shore it up. That’s why he could not believe what he saw in 2006, when he returned to the hill within weeks of a landslide that crashed into and plugged the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, creating a new channel that threatened homes on a street called Steelhead Drive. Instead of seeing homes being vacated, he saw carpenters building new ones. “Frankly, I was shocked that the county permitted any building across from the river,” says Miller. “We’ve known that it’s been failing. It’s not unknown that this hazard exists.”